Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture

Using Visual Analytics for Decision Making

The planning of built and natural environments incorporates participatory processes that are
more and more supported by information and communications technology (ICT). On the one hand, this
implies potentially more diverse knowledge of the masses in form of participatory contributions, e. g.,
opinions, ideas or formal statements. On the other hand, this leads to an increasing data complexity in
terms of size and interconnectedness which in turn complicates making sense, retrieving implicit new
information, and decision making. We describe the need for more sophisticated methods and present
how the field of visual analytics can overcome these challenges by demonstrating the applicability of
the visual analytics process model for one exemplary but fundamental use case that focuses on an
analysis task in e-participation for planning purposes.